Toby Harris

I’ve wanted a simple, compact VGA mixer for as long as I’ve had a laptop. Something I could fit in the same case as the laptop, and something that wouldn’t render my precise computer imagery through the lens of a 1950’s television: a single pixel line should not end up blurred and flickery when projected on a screen. My need is for live video performance, but anybody who has had to put a powerpoint presentation through their laptop’s tv-out socket or seen the chaos caused by swapping cables in and out of computers in front of an audience should have an idea of just how useful such a thing could be.

it’s common to hear people talk about the beginnings of projects, but rare to witness a post-mortem. doubly so in the world of kickstarter: the pitches are now part of maker culture, but where’s the venue for a summing-up at the end?

If you’ve been keeping your finger on the VJ pulse as close as we do, you couldn’t have missed the arrival of the Spark D-Fuser. However, we appreciate the fact that some of you are busy touring or designing wicked content. Or even may actually have a social life. Either way, you could have missed it getting that elusive ‘Buy Now’ button earlier this year.
Or it could be that you’ve seen the button and the hype, but are wondering if it’s really all that it’s cranked up to be. It could be that you want to know more about this mysterious magic box that will solve all your problems, before you part with your hard-earned VJ cash and actually press that ‘Buy Now’ button.
Either way, we’ve had the pleasure of working with that little bad boy on various occasions, as well as seen it in use by quite a few touring VJs. So we figured it was high time to give a first hand experience of what the D-Fuser actually defuses.

happiness is seeing photos like this: prototypes and factories far behind, a d-fuser out in the wild. truly the wilds here, courtesy of sean healey and his audio-visual performance ‘desert engines’. was it almost a year ago he was interviewing me as this whole endeavour was announced, prototype to pre-order?

prompted by the vidvox feature, a guest tutorial video showing vj use of the d-fuser, complete with a demonstration of how you can link the d-fuser controller with your laptops for better audio-visual integration when performing as a group.

“VDMX has been a big thing for D-Fuse. It’s the engine that drives our most innovative shows, laying out and compositing footage across multiple screens, hosting patch upon patch of custom D-Fuse development work. However, for our kind of theatrical shows, plugging a laptop directly into the projection setup just isn’t an option. We need video hardware to keep a solid feed to the projectors from early soundcheck to us walking on stage, we need to have a master fade control for our output, and we need to crossfade between our laptops to mix collaboratively. For year after year there was no solution to this, as with each laptop rendering all screens simultaneously the video format is outside of what the SD and then HD hardware can handle. What we needed was a DVI mixer. There wasn’t one, and so I made one.”

b-seite charge one: provoke vjs into thinking about the future of their practice, via showing the toys and talk about how i made it as a post-vj. this was a tidied up version of the talk i improvised at LPM last year, except that then the mixer was a final prototype, and here I was at a festival with two d-fusers as part of their tech setup. mixer’s i’d sold but had never seen, the boxes opened up by hands other than mine, in a country far away.

turning the dvi-mixer project into the *spark d-fuser product was very much an act of faith that peer demand meant something. but in no small part too, it was an act of hubris: i said i was going to do this thing, and i found i wasn’t at all happy looking at it fizzling away before the 2012 reboot. put those two things together, and you will likely decide to offer a pre-ordering window, and pledge to make as many are as ordered. it could be two, twenty, or two hundred; a loss at the low-end, a profit at the high end, but one way or another they were going to get out there.

the demo video upon which pre-orders were placed had prototype hardware; here now is a manufactured product, out of the shipping packaging, running the final v25 software. i say final, because as the units spread around the world that prototype is no longer the sole test-bed: v25 encodes feedback and testing from real customers. i’m proud of where i’ve got it to.

by rights, as the first off the line this should be sean healey’s, but the delivery note at the top of the pile was one for the US. but - this is it! the beginning of the end, the first packaged product.

not just the solitary 1T-C2-750 that we, as D-Fuse, bought in the summer of 2009 any more! a shelf full of the things, all programmed up with custom firmware to do additive mixing. what you can’t see is the floor of the industrial unit laid out with a sea of boxes, ready to be assembled up and shipped off.

there’s a certain terror in thinking that all the time and effort invested into getting a good product could be wiped out by damage in transit: designing the packaging has been just as involved and stressful as the product itself.

this is the first factory build, running the firmware to be shipped, and with that an announcement: the video processors are coming with custom firmware that allows additive mixing, and the controllers have an implementation that morphs the crossfader behaviour from a flat blend to full add.

the assembled PCBs and manufactured cases passed the physical fit test, but thats moot if the damn things don’t actually work: the real business of being at the factory was to finalise the test spec. finish up a self-test firmware, supply a pc with rs232, open sound control, dmx and a processing sketch to tie the different comms together, and spend the rest of the day detailing up the test procedure document, as pedantic a document as something can be.

back to the south coast where an electronics facility has assembled the PCBs and is about to start the box build. people in lab coats walking around with trays of electronic innards with my logo on it… a new one for me, and the first concrete sense of the scale of this.

at some point, you realise that foam lined box isn’t going to cut it. to hold cable, power supply and controller neatly together, and do it without squashing requires some form of carefully shaped insert. hence a night of cardboard, metal rule, craft knife and ever-refining design print-outs.

Just a quick reminder that if you did want to order one and haven’t so far, we’re now in the last 48 hours for ordering.
Given the delays in opening – banks and paypal, urgh! – I’m going to hold orders open for an extra day. Orders close 23:59 Monday 10th, GMT.

with two huge milestones, it’s the point of no return: the site with price, spec and ordering info went live yesterday at sparklive.net, and i’ve just committed real money to get the first manufacturing task primed.

“The *spark d-fuser lets you cross-fade between laptops. It’s compact, affordable and — after quite some time(!) — I’m now ready to make the manufacturing run. So this is the final prototype, and with this I’m making this video to demonstrate the features and functionality so you can decide whether you want to have one yourself. If you do, you need to order now so that it can go and be made as part of that manufacture run.”

i’m super happy to announce that the site through which i’ll be detailing and selling the *spark d-fuser mixer will be going live next friday, then will start taking orders for a week starting the friday after that, and on the first september the manufacture run will start. huzzah!

in which i set out my stall, hawking the wares and ideas that have helped make my ‘post-vj’ life. half an hour, somewhat off the cuff, and probably ill-advised in parts. the bulk of the talk covers some of the backroom work and event life of the dvi mixer hardware and screenrunner software projects, but contextualised by how i. vjs should work towards exploiting the liveness possible in their practice, ii. which should lead to a more rewarding, less clichéd life, iii. and one more profitable and sustainable.

after being one of the forces behind qmedia’s inaugural open studios last year, this year i was playing behind-the-scenes fixer, and with things fixed was able to get a few hours hacking on the dvi mixer before the show wrapped. even better, having established last year the reward of documentation, there was now a film crew looking intrigued and asking me to explain my research…

for a few fractions of a millimetre here and there, this is pretty much a whole new pcb design. it also meant no magnetically isolated ethernet jacks (the mag in magjack should really be magic instead), which puts you on a path of doing that isolation your own circuitry, and that… that can put you on the path of feature creep.

it’s been two and a half years since the magic week of going from idea to breaking a working dvi mixer package and the ensuing dreams of getting it out there for everybody. problem is, thats still in dream territory: where’s the manufacturable hardware or website buy-button?

having spent most of my time since arriving in berlin behind a laptop screen, it was time to unveil effort #1: a dvi mixer project presentation, keynote document with i’s dotted and t’s crossed. more importantly, for the swedes won’t buy a pig in a sack, the presentation was followed by a demo of - and hands on with - the new *spark d-fuser prototype.

another work-in-progress update for the *spark d-fuser aka dvi mixer project: here we have the v1 pcb design, parts specified, plans drawn, and – with shawn multimeter in hand – the leg-work translating that into something that works. the real announcement here, though, is this: i will be presenting the project in full in berlin on the 12th june, so expect to know a lot more about what, when and how around then.

its been quite some time since november and nothing visible has been happening. this is a quick post to say that stuff is happening behind the scenes, albeit with lots of delays caused by my spare time being completely out of sync with people i’ve been trying to get things going with. but now the momentum is back, and here shawn bonkowski and i are choosing sliders from the seemingly limitless selection on offer.
being trained in product design and loving this book, i’d have said i have a fair understanding of how much work it can take to transform a prototype into something suitable for manufacture and the real world. but i have to admit, this has taken far far longer than i expected. though now, i think, i can say that the controller is falling into place: still far from having a final, manufacturable, design, but the road to get there is clear and doable.

here’s an update on the dvi-mixer project; i’ve been through the replies to the expression of interest, am working on some things that have come up, and here are a load of answers to common questions that came up.

well… the word is officially out, and rippling around the internet. never seen so many twitter mentions or positive adjectives next to my name - which is nice - but the real deal is are there enough people out there who want one to make a limited production run from the prototype: its not about interest, it will be about orders. http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/projects/dvi-mixer

as a warm-up to d-fuse‘s trip to brazil, we performed a test of the new live piece “particle” at electrovision. it definitely felt like a test, as things were plugged in and loaded up to be used in anger in for the first time, and while i wasn’t so happy creatively with the form this first rendition took, that is secondary to what happened there: the dvi-mixer i’ve been dreaming of for years - and that my work turning transforming d-fuse’s live shows has been predicated on - worked as simply and unobtrusively as it should. all the sophistication and craziness lives in the laptop, where we have creative control as far as we’re wishing to configure and code, and we have hardware reliabiliy to ensure we can a) guarantee solid output signal to the projectors no matter what is going on with the laptops and b) mix together and tag team the performance between two visuals laptops.